RACE & ETHNICITY

In 1986, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone remarked that the
average American intellectual standard is lower than the average Japanese
standard because of the blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. He has often said
that the source of Japan's strength lies in its "racial homogeneity." Eleven
years later, University of Texas Law School Professor Lino Graglia triggered
a firestorm of criticism for his remarks that "Blacks and Mexican-Americans
are not academically competitive with whites in selective institutions.
It is the result primarily of cultural effects. They have a culture that
seems not to encourage achievement. Failure is not looked upon with disgrace."

It has been said that race is the plague of civilization. In 1977, Andrew Young, at that time the chief U.S. representative
to the United Nations, claimed that a race war in South Africa would inevitably
precipitate racial conflict in the United States. Some countries, like
Great Britain and Australia, eliminate the potential for conflict by simply
denying or severely limiting entry.

However, American society has always been enriched by its waves of
immigrants. John Kennedy observed how Alexis de Tocqueville saw the United
States as "a society of immigrants, each of whom had begun life anew, on
an equal footing. This was the secret of America: a nation of people with
the fresh memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers ..." In
2004, the Census Bureau predicted that in the year 2050 minority groups would
comprise one-half of the total American population of 420 million.
Hispanics will comprise roughly one-quarter of the population, blacks 15%, and
Asians 8%.

As the proportion of Americans increasingly becomes Hispanic,
black and Asian, inequalities grow. According to the Pew Hispanic Center's
2004 "The
Wealth of Hispanic Households: 1996 to 2002" study, "the
median net worth of Hispanic households in 2002 was $7,932. This was only nine
percent of $88,651, the median wealth of non-Hispanic White households at the
same time. The net worth of Non-Hispanic Blacks was only $5,988. Thus, the
wealth of Latino and Black households is less than one-tenth the wealth of White
households even though Census data show their income is two-thirds again as
high."

Here we consider some of the sociological facets of race and ethnicity,
and how they are interwoven with other dimensions of social
stratification.

ETHNICITY AND
RACE:
GENERAL INDEXES

MINORITY GROUP = A group typically numerically inferior to the rest
of the population of a state, in a non-dominant position, whose members--being
nationals of the state-- possess ethnic, religious, or linguistic characteristics
distinguishing them from the rest of the population. Typically, members
of a minority group share a sense of solidarity and a desire to preserve
their culture, traditions, religion, or language. A minority group can
sometimes be a numerical majority in a minority group position. Minority
group status is not a matter of numbers; it is determined by the presence
of distinguishing features such as discrimination. Central features characterizing
a minority group are:

The members of a minority group suffer various disadvantages at the
hand of another group;

A minority group is identified by group characteristics that are socially
visible;

A minority is a self-conscious group with a strong sense of "oneness";

People usually do not become members of a minority group voluntarily;
they are born into it;

By choice or necessity, members of a minority group tend to marry within
the group."

AFRICAN AMERICANS

The only group to have involuntarily immigrated to the United States,
to have been forcibly stripped of its culture, African or black Americans
has as a group yet to receive its fair share of the American dream. Of
those surveyed in a Fall 1995 TIME/CNN poll, 56% of blacks did not believe
that discrimination against them would ever diminish (compared to 27% of
whites). And while near two-thirds of whites thought that race relations
would eventually improve, only 44% of blacks agreed.

The thirtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's death in 1998
produced considerable stocktaking. Take a look at PBS Frontline's page
"The
Two Nations of Black America", which features economic trends data and
interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, and
William Julius Wilson. Also worth a look is
Voices of Civil Rights, an
online archive of materials from the civil rights movement.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot a "conspiracy of silence"
has nearly erased this sad chapter in race relations from the nation's collective memory

From PBS "American Experience," The Murder of Emmett Till:
"The brutal killing that mobilized the civil rights movement." In mid
2004, the Justice Department announced that it would reopen the infamous 1955
case.

DATA AND
GRAPHS

THE WORKINGS OF THE
"MELTING POT": INTERMARRIAGE

Certainly one mechanism by which the American melting pot works is through
the intermarriages of different racial, ethnic, and national groups.
By 1980, according to the U.S. Census, only one quarter of American-born,
non-Hispanic whites was married to someone with an undivided ethnic heritage
identical to his or her own. Take, for instance, the case of Italian Americans:
of those born before 1920, some 8 percent had mixed ancestry, compared
to over 70 percent of those born after 1970.

The melting pot has not, however, melded that many unions across
racial lines. Roughly 99 percent of African American women and 97 percent
of African American men marry one of their race. This is not to deny that
considerable changes have occurred in recent decades. For every 100,000
married couples in the United States, in 1990 there were 396 black-white
unions, compared to 126 in 1960.

Public attitudes and state laws have not historically promoted biracial
marriages. Until the 1967 Loving
v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, sixteen
states, most of them Southern, had anti-miscegenation laws preventing such
couplings. Since 1972, the NORC General Social Surveys have included the
question "Do you think there should be laws against marriages between Blacks
and whites?" In the 1972-75 period, some 38 percent of white Americans
agreed with the statement. By the 1990s, only 18 percent agreed. Looking
at levels of agreement by birth cohorts over time, observe that support
for miscegenation laws consistently declines the younger the cohort and
that cohort consensus remains basically constant over time.

THINKING ABOUT RACIAL
STEREOTYPES

The dust has yet to settle from Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
Therein it is claimed that the social and economic advantages whites have
over blacks is due to their greater intelligence. Among the many shortcomings
of the authors' logic and methodology is the simple fact that there is
only one species of the human race; it cannot be broken into biological
units such as race. Further, in studying the variability of intelligence
between those in our racial taxonomy, molecular biologists have found that
more than 85 percent is among individuals within the same race.

Nevertheless, most of us hold preconceived theories about attributes
of those in various groups and view others through their stereotypes. For
instance, three-quarters of African-Americans believed in 1994 that whites
are "insensitive to other people" and 42 percent said that Asian-Americans
are "unscrupulously crafty and devious in business" (Harper's Magazine,
1994). Stereotyping is undoubtedly a natural process, used by individuals
to simplify the world and to make life somewhat predictable. Nevertheless,
we always need to remember the maxim of W.I. Thomas that if people believe
something to be true it will be true in its consequences.

Let's examine Americans' perceptions of the intelligence of whites
and blacks. In 1990, the National Opinion Research Center asked a random
sample of non- institutionalized, English-speaking Americans 18 years of
age and older a series of questions dealing with characteristics of various
racial and ethnic groups. Included were the following: Do the people
in the following groups tend to be unintelligent (1) or do they tend to
be intelligent (7)? Whites? The intelligence of Blacks? Here analyzed
are the differences in intelligence scores given by white and black
Americans. If, for instance, a person gave an intelligence score of 4 for
whites and 4 for blacks, then that person sees no racial difference; if
one scores whites as 4 and blacks as 5 then that person sees blacks as
generally being more intelligent than whites. Presented in the graphs below
are the mean difference scores given by whites and blacks broken down by
age and by education.

How do you interpret these correlations? Consider framing
them in
terms of Derrick Bell's
("Dr. King's Legacy: A Help or Harm in the Racial
Struggle?" Trinity's Martin Luther King keynote speech presented on
Jan. 17, 2000) thesis that blacks are the key societal glue, the social
stabilizers, of American society as they are always perceived to be below
everyone else. Even the poorest whites still see themselves better than
blacks and thus do not agitate the system for social change. And the new
immigrants from Asia and Latin America have learned this mindset as
well. In sum, without racism the American melting pot does not
work.

To investigate how racism might take the fizz out of class conflict, consider
the following table from the GSS:

% WHITES
AGREEING THAT "LARGE DIFFERENCES IN INCOME
ARE NECESSARY FOR AMERICA'S PROSPERITY (n=706)

EDUCATION:

HS DROPOUT

HS GRAD

SOME POST-SECONDARY

4+ YEARS COLLEGE

TOTAL

Believe blacks smarter or as smart as
whites

34%

28%

25%

16%

24%

Believe whites are smarter than blacks

38%

31%

42%

43%

37%

From the TOTAL column on the
right we observe that whites believing that they are smarter than blacks are
more likely to agree that national prosperity requires large differences in
income--an important belief for a status quo that features one of the largest
gaps between the haves and have-nots in the developed world.

HISPANIC AMERICANS

As recently as 1950, the Census counted fewer than 4 million U.S. residents
who would fall under the catch-all category "Hispanic" (see Linda Robinson's
Hispanics
don't exist" on the supposed 17 major Latino subcultures in the U.S.).
By 2001 there was an estimated 37 million Hispanic Americans, or nearly 13% of the
total population, and their numbers were growing nearly five times faster than the general
public (see Census Brief, "The
Hispanic Population"). According to a 2003 Census
Bureau report, Hispanics surpassed blacks as America's largest minority
group. For one perspective of the implications of this demographic fact,
read Samuel Huntington's controversial "The
Hispanic Challenge" (Foreign Policy, March/April
2004).

BORDER
STUDIES

HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVES OF THEHISPANIC AMERICAN
EXPERIENCE

ASIAN AMERICANS

The Census Bureau reported in 1990 that the Asian population grew nearly
seven times as fast as the general American population and three times
as fast as the black population. Nearly 23% of Asian-Americans are of Chinese
heritage and about 19%, or 1.4 million people, trace their roots to the
Philippines. Japanese-Americans, who in 1960 represented 52% of the Asian-American
population, now represent 11.7%, just ahead of East Indians, at 11.2%,
and Koreans, at 10.9%.

Asian-Nation "an exploration of the
historical, political, social, economic, and cultural elements and issues that
make up today's Asian American community." maintained by C.N. Le.

War
Relocation Authority Camps in Arizona, 1942-1946 "In this era of renewed concern over the potential impact of racial
profiling, the University of Arizona Library's exhibit on the internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War II is a well-timed reminder of the
inanity of such actions, to say nothing of their disruptiveness in the lives
of (otherwise) ordinary American citizens." The Scout Report, January 18, 2002